Sammy Baloji’s The Tree of Authenticity is a deeply poetic documentary weaving its cinematic narrative together through history, ecology, and interrogating Belgian colonialism in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Premiering in the Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Competition, Baloji’s film offers a disruption to the colonial archives which dominate historical narratives.
In this intellectual experience that lingers long after the screen fades to black, Baloji’s cinematic essay opens with beautifully captured shots of the massive green spaces in the Congo Basin where its trees and jungles have been scientifically proven to absorb much of the carbon dioxide produced by the world.
As the camera shifts it shows the now-abandoned Koyeba Yangambi biological research center, acting as a starting point to some of the film’s subjects, where voices from that past describe the brutality of colonialism. The voices are of Paul Panda Farnana and Abiron Beirnaert, scientists whose work in the 20th century still resonates today. Farnana is a striking figure. A Congolese agronomist and expatriate who lived in Europe in the first decades of the 1900s, he is known as the first Black Belgian colonial civil servant. Here he is resurrected in voice-over detailing his raw, first-hand accounts of exclusion, racism, and his struggle to become recognised in the scientific circles which marginalized him despite his talent and intellect. His testimony on the arrogance of colonialism reaches to modern days, when Congo continues to pay the price, and suffers the consequences, of its occupation.
Baloji’s storytelling doesn’t rely on straightforward historical narration; instead, he provides layers of time periods, dividing the film into three parts, blending archival material with present-day footage in order to demonstrate a sense of historical continuity. As Farnana’s words are narrated against modern imagery, the combination gives his words credibility and allows viewers to conclude how little has changed, and in some cases how much more alienated from nature we have become. Similarly, Beirnaert’s writings are retold in voice-over in an almost lyrical tone that balances Farnana’s rawness.
However, the film’s boldest choices come in its third part where the storytelling shifts perspective entirely. Here, the tree itself becomes the narrator, providing a poetic testimony. This artistic choice gives a voice to a silent witness to the brutal deforestation and the wiping-out of jungles in the name of industry and development, with thousands of lives affected. Cinematically, giving the tree a voice (while not a new technique) transfers the film from a mere account of human stupidity to the metaphysical, with an agenda urging viewers to reconsider their relationship with the environment. Nature has not been spared from the brutal history of colonialism.
This very act of ‘interrogating colonialism’ is even more obvious in the film’s visuals and sounds, as the camera pans slowly over the forest and the old trees and textured bark, allowing each frame to convey a profound sense of place. Such images are used by Baloji to show how colonialism did not only obliterate human beings; it also violated nature. As the film describes colonialism as “rationalized vandalism,” these words linger and become relevant in recent scenes of deforestation of the Congo Basin, a place which has long played a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate amid global denial. Accompanied only by the sounds of leaves and forests, the silence emphasizes the weight of the unspoken and the severe gaps in our historical memory.
The Tree of Authenticity also invites a deeper reflection on the politics of knowledge and historical memory. For example, Farnana’s story, though crucial, remains largely forgotten outside scientific circles, while colonial narratives are preserved and propagated. In all fields, including cinema, colonial archives in Africa and Asia have dictated the historical narrative for centuries, allowing little room for voices which resisted and suffered under oppressive regimes. In highlighting Farnana’s words, The Tree of Authenticity disrupts this traditional and conservative power dynamic, offering a much-needed counter-narrative.
Being the only African film in IFFR’s Tiger Competition, The Tree of Authenticity is a fresh breeze in African cinema, using the colonial archive to condemn years of occupation and brutality, but also to engage with the world’s ongoing activism in pointing out the risks of being estranged from nature. The film’s urgency parallels a growing tendency in the world to deny global warming, and worse than that, to blame the whole phenomenon on developing countries (and in absurd cases immigrants), hence whitewashing years of abuse by former colonial powers.
Director: Sammy Baloji
Screenwriters: Sammy Baloji, Ellen Meiresonne, David Van Reybrouck, Thomas Hendricks
Producers: Rosa Spaliviero
Cinematographer: Frank Moka
Editing: Luca Mattei
Sound design: Chris Watson, Laszlo Umbreit, Frédéric Furnelle
Principal cast: Edson Anibal, Diederick Peeters
Production company: Twenty Nine Studio & Production
Sales / World rights holder: Twenty Nine Studio & Production
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In French, Dutch
85 minutes
